Consider This from NPR - The White House COVID-19 Crisis

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

The president, first lady, and a growing list of White House staffers have tested positive for the coronavirus. Ever since President Trump left the White House for Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday, administration officials — including the president's physician — have been reluctant to share clear and complete information about his health. Zeynep Tufecki, professor at the University of North Carolina, explains how the White House cluster may have developed. The president's niece, psychologist Mary Trump, tells NPR that her family has a hard time confronting the hard reality of disease. Trump is the author of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The story of the White House coronavirus cluster may have started back on September 26. Thank you very much. Thank you. That Saturday, Republican officials and conservative leaders gathered at the White House for the president's announcement of his nominee to the Supreme Court. Judge Amy Coney Barrett. Hundreds of people were there. At least nine of them and counting, including the president, the first lady, and several Republican senators have now tested positive. Photos from the event show guests, including the president,

talking close together inside the White House without masks. The truth is it was very rare to see any of the staff wear a mask in the building, unfortunately. Until August, Olivia Troy was working in the White House on the coronavirus task force as a Homeland Security advisor to Vice President Pence. She resigned, she says, because the president and his administration failed to take the pandemic seriously. You know, I felt awkward at times when I would wear a mask. Sometimes I would feel the pressure of everyone else not having one and be the only one in the room. So I would take it off. But I always made it a point to really keep at least six feet apart

from the vice president and other critical players just because I just, it just, I knew the risk was there. This virus spreads very easily. Consider this. The president's illness reveals just how easily. What's not easy is getting a straight answer from the White House about how the president is doing. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Monday, October 5th. And how a temporary solution turned into an everlasting problem. Listen now to ThruLine from NPR, where we go back in time to understand the present. It's Consider This from NPR, and we're recording this on Monday afternoon.

A couple of hours ago, the president announced he would leave Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The president's physician described Trump's condition this way. Though he may not entirely be out of the woods yet, the team and I agree that all our evaluations, and most importantly, his clinical status, support the president's safe return home, where he'll be surrounded by world-class medical care 24-7. In the coming days, there are going to be a lot of questions about how the decision was made for the president to leave the hospital and about whether the White House is giving the country a full and complete picture of his health. Because so far, that's not what we've been getting. Mr. President, thank you for being with us. I know you've been busy all night.

So let's go back to last Thursday. I just went for a test and we'll see what happens. I mean, who knows? President Trump, calling it to Sean Hannity's show on Fox News, said he'd just taken a coronavirus test and was waiting for the results. They just do it. It'll come back later, I guess. And the first lady also. But Trump reportedly had already tested positive. He was waiting for confirmation from a second test. So we'll see what happens. And that kicked off a long weekend of conflicting and outright false information from the White House. The president giving a thumbs up to the cameras with a mask, walking by himself. The president walked out of the White House Friday night and got into a helicopter that took him to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. And that night, a statement from the White House said the president was, quote,

doing well and, quote, not requiring any supplemental oxygen. The next morning... He has not received any supplemental oxygen. He's not on oxygen right now, that's right. The president's physician, Sean Connolly, would not say whether the president had received oxygen. He has not received any at all? He's not needed any this morning, today at all. And he was asked repeatedly. Has he ever been on supplemental oxygen?

Right now, he is not on oxygen. I know you keep saying right now, but should we read into the fact that he had been previously? Yesterday and today, he was not on oxygen. So he has not been on it during his COVID treatment? He's not on oxygen right now. We later learned the president had been given oxygen after his oxygen levels dropped rapidly Friday. And that's a red flag when it comes to COVID patients.

We were real concerned with that. He had a fever and his blood oxygen level had dropped rapidly. That was White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in a phone call with Fox News on Saturday night. Meadows had already added to the confusion earlier in the day. He'd attempted to share with reporters, with his name off the record, that the president was still not on a clear path to recovery. And that was just an hour after doctors said Trump was, quote, doing very well. It wasn't until Sunday morning that the president's physician admitted, yes, he had received oxygen. So

reporters asked, why had the doctor been reluctant to say so? It's a good question. So I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the president, that his course of illness has had. I didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction. And in doing so, you know, it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn't necessarily true. It's not clear what Connolly meant when he suggested that providing information to the press could, quote, steer the course of illness. That's it. Thank you, folks. What is clear to at least one person watching the weekend unfold is that confronting the reality of illness is not the president's strong suit. Because he cannot admit to the weakness of being ill or of other people's being ill.

Mary Trump, the president's niece. She spoke to NPR on Sunday. She's a psychologist and recently wrote a book about the president's upbringing and their family. She spoke to my colleague, Michelle Martin. And I can tell you that the reason we called you is that your book isn't part about your family's attitude about money, but it is also about the family's attitudes about health and well-being. I mean, you go into great detail about the way your uncle, the president, was influenced by his father, Fred. How would you describe their overall attitude about illness and being sick?

It was unacceptable and a display of unforgivable weakness, which sounds incredible and cool, but happens to be true. And when I say illness, I mean both physical illness not really tolerated or dealt with in any direct way. And it also had to do with things like addictions. And my dad was an alcoholic. And in my family, it was treated like a moral failing. And I just want to point out, you know, your great-grandfather, Frederick Trump, died in 1918. The cause of death was reportedly listed as pneumonia, but now I understand it's believed that he was a victim of what would come to be known as the Spanish flu, and you also go into some other traumatic health crises experienced by your family, as many families do. So how was

illness dealt with? Was it basically ignored? Were people supposed to ignore? How was it dealt with in your view? Well, first of all, what's fascinating is I had no idea that my great-grandfather had died during the 1918 flu pandemic from the flu until I read about it somewhere a couple of years ago. And Donald also seems to have forgotten about that. But, you know, it depended on who it was. And it was also driven by the fact that my grandfather was never sick, ever, untilale's Power of Positive Thinking, which he took to such an extreme level that it was toxic because it left no room for expressions of what he considered negativity of any kind. You know, sadness, despair, being physically ill. So my grandmother with her osteoporosis would come home from the hospital and need more care and physical therapy. And my grandfather was unable to tolerate it. You know,

he'd be in the room with her. And as soon as she started, you know, showing that she was in physical pain, he would say, everything's great, right? Everything's great. And he'd leave the room. Mary Trump speaking with my colleague, Michelle Martin. So let's go back to the outbreak at the White House. In public health terms, it's a cluster. I see a cluster. I see a cluster that is arguably a super spreading cluster, depending on how many people eventually get infected. Zeynep Tufekci is a professor at

UNC Chapel Hill and writer for The Atlantic. She says the coronavirus is surprisingly non-contagious most of the time, but when it does spread, it's often in clusters of people who've spent time close together, indoors. We've been told six feet, which is, yes, important, but it's not some magic number because this virus can spread through the air. It has short-range aerosols, which means it's airborne. So indoor six feet is not enough. You can't just sort of be six feet away if you're in a, especially in a poorly ventilated place. Tufekci spoke to my colleague Lulu Garcia Navarro about why we need to remember something about the virus that the White House may have forgotten or simply ignored. You mentioned venue, ventilation and vocalization.

And those are the three V's you call them. Yes. And I think this is part of the reason the White House got this false confidence, because they kept flouting the rules. They kept like not wearing masks, and they kept sort of gathering indoors. And they do do this test, that's kind of this rapid test, but that's not as reliable. You can get a false negative. You might not have just peaked in your viral load yet. So they just relied only on that and did not follow the rest of the rules. And we see from the party they had for the Supreme Court nomination, they had indoor receptions as well. Well, you've written about this, and there's been quite a few studies

that show that, yes, the way that we understand that the coronavirus disperses is a little bit different now. Tell us the role of super spreaders and how the virus can transmit to large numbers of people at once. I will. For example, if you look at some of the countries that got hit early on, you see that they had a super spreading event. For example, in South Korea, one woman linked to a church cluster, she is responsible for 5,000 infections, which is a mind-blowing number, but that's how it happened. On the other hand, the studies show that sometimes 70 to 80% of the infected people don't transmit onwards at all. So yes, it's a really imbalanced behavior. So you look and you don't see the transmission and you're thinking, oh, this is

fine. This is not very contagious. This is not transmitting because yeah, 70, 80% of the time, nothing's happening. And then boom, you know, you get a super spreading cluster and you get this enormous number of people. And it's almost always indoors. It's almost always if the ventilation is poor and the people are not wearing masks. So while it's a little scary, I also find it a little encouraging in that we have a very specific set of guidelines on what to really avoid. We only have a few seconds left, but I'm just wondering, do we know anything about what makes someone a super spreader? Why certain people seem to be more highly contagious?

There's probably a biological variation in that some people are super emitters, but we don't really know how to test for that it also seems that the day before people uh have their symptoms that's when they're most infections which is a little worrisome because before you even know you're ill or you just start having maybe mild symptoms you can't make sense of that's when people are most infectious but the last component of it is the setting, the venue. Indoors, poorly ventilated, unmasked. So it's the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time. It comes together, and that's how we get super spreading events. Zeynep Tufekci, professor at UNC Chapel Hill, writer for The Atlantic. It's Consider This from NPR.

I'm Adi Cornish.